This is a blog consisting mainly of my recent columns - on history, politics, economics, and some frivolous ones. I enjoy writing, and enjoy good writing.

Friday, October 17, 2014

HAS HINDI A CHANCE?

[The Bharatiya Janata Party tends to be nationalist in superficial ways - in dress, lingo, headwear etc. During its first long tenure at the centre, it was trying to promote Hindi, which is spoken at best by two-fifths of the population. I had some practical advice on how to promote Hindi, published in Business Standard of 28 August 2001.]HOW TO HINDIANIZE BHARAT

The BJP has done much to displace
English in the central government. Raj Nath Singh used to insist that all
notings to him must be in Hindi. North Indian ministers, who are far in excess
of the proportion of Hindi speakers in the country, insist on having north
Indian civil servants; the chances of an IAS officer from Bengal or Kerala
serving in the centre are nowadays trivial. The IT Task Force recommended that
programming should be done in Hindi. Hindi interpretation has been one of the
most prolific channels of employment under this government. How likely is it
that the Hindu nationalists will be able to make Hindi a truly national
language?

India is one of the very few
polyglot countries in the world; and as Florian Coulmas pointed out in his
fascinating book, Language and Economy (Blackwell
1992), a polyglot world is expensive. Canada has for long tried to make itself
bilingual. It spends enormous amounts on translation between English and
French, and on teaching both to students in school. Yet if one goes to the
western provinces, it is as if French did not exist. French-speaking Quebec has
the opposite problem – it is more advantageous for the Quebecois (just as it is
for Indians) to learn English, and the Quebec government has to make strenuous
efforts to prevent English from being used. France has the same problem.
Coulmas mentions the case of a company which spelt cigarettes as being filter instead of filtre in France and was fined 7500 Francs. Just as Delhi Golf Club
has been penalized for not admitting enough babus, Murli Manohar Joshi should
consider fining companies for not using Hindi words in ads; he should give a
Padma Vibhushan to the writer of the slogan, “Dil maange more!”

C D Deshmukh used to say that the
more Indian languages develop, the more similar they will become, for they will
all draw on their common heritage of Sanskrit to extend their vocabulary. This
was actually put into practice in the case of Hindi, where Raghuvira
mass-produced technical terms out of Sanskrit; that is how BJP’s pidgin
Sanskrit was created. But there is a conflict between BJP’s desire to promote
Hindi and its determination to exterminate “foreign” – that is, Persian or
Arabic – words. One only has to look at the evolution of modern Indian
languages to understand why Sanskrit went out of circulation: it was a
difficult language to pronounce and learn, and modern Indian languages are its
simplifications. Simplicity is an important advantage in languages that get
accepted. For so many Sanskrit words there is a derivative in one or the other
Indian language that is easier to pronounce; and most of the languages have
simpler grammar than Sanskrit. If Joshi were interested in winning wide
acceptance of a national language, he would put a team on devising a language
that chose the simplest and commonest words from modern Indian languages and
constructed a language out of them. Gandhi’s Hindustani was designed to do this
for Hindi – to construct a mass language out of the simplest words irrespective
of their origin. Unfortunately the programme was hijacked by Sanskritization.

If Joshi were seriously to take
up the design of a new, efficient national language, he would find it useful to
read G K Zipf’s brilliant book, Human
Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort (Hafner 1949). Zipf showed that
if one ranked words in a language on the basis of the frequency with which they
are used and multiplied them by the frequency, their product was a constant: in
other words, that in languages as different as Nootka, Plains Cree, Chinese and
German, a small number of words are used most frequently, and lots of words
very infrequently. Further, the more frequently used words have more meanings;
the frequency of use is proportional to the square of the number of meanings.
And finally, the frequency of use of words varies inversely with their length;
the most used words are short.

Someone like Joshi, who wishes to
promote a language, would do well to ask himself how he could persuade people
to use his language; one answer arising from the existing languages is that
people prefer to use short words with multiple meanings. Chinese goes to the
extremes: Chinese words are extremely short – generally only one or two
syllables – and the same word with slightly differing pronunciations carries a
multiplicity of meanings. Paradoxically, Sanskrit also has this characteristic;
many Sanskrit words have multiple meanings. If only Sanskrit were as easy to
pronounce as Chinese, Joshi’s problem would be solved. One solution may be to
shorten Sanskrit words to two syllables at most and throw out superfluous
syllables, and to replace all diphthongs with simple, unjoined letters.

He would also have to think of
simplifying the script. Any Hindi typist knows what a pain it is to keep adding
vowels, which are written within the letters; if only vowels and consonants
were separated as in European languages, Hindi would become more acceptable.
Many languages have adopted Latin alphabet. Kemal Atatürk introduced it in
Turkish, and Soekarno in Indonesian. Most African languages, which had no
script of their own, have adopted the Latin alphabet. Even Hindi was written in
it as taught in the British Indian army. But with independence, nationalism
erupted even in script. Admittedly, the Latin alphabet is not too well adapted
to Indian languages; there are a number of vowels and consonants for which it
has no equivalents. But an extended version of it could be devised.

Finally, there is the vast labour
of inventing technical terms in Hindi. There is an entire industry engaged in
this; the results are evident in the verbal obscurities of BJP leaders. But no
one apart from them uses the terms. The simplest solution is the one adopted by
the Indonesians; they imported Dutch terms wholesale into their language. This
has happened in Hindi without anyone’s by-your-leave; when educated people
(other than linguistic zealots) speak Hindi, they lace it liberally with
English words. This practice might as well be given official sanction.

A purist might wonder what will
be left of Hindi if it adopts English words on a large scale. My view is that
it is far more important for a language to be widely used than for it to be
pure. Mighty languages like German and French are failing to stand up to
English because they do not import foreign words as easily. The best chance for
Hindi would be if it were used for poetry. Foreigners are unlikely to learn
Hindi for access to low-temperature physics or palaeontology. But they may be
attracted to it if Hindi songs become world hits. If Joshi wanted to make Hindi
a world language, he should invest money in Bollywood, and make it churn out
tuneful songs with an easy meaning and an even easier pronunciation. Starting
with “Dil maange more!”

About Me

I write in newspapers and magazines for a living. That does not occupy me much, since I write pretty fast. So I travel when I have money, swim when it is not too cold, and read to be surprised, challenged and entertained at other times.
I was a professional economist for three decades. I taught, wrote, studied and reported. I worked in five countries, and did twelve jobs.
When, in 1991, India was in an economic crisis, Manmohan Singh, an economist bureaucrat, was made India's finance minister. He engaged me. We reversed old socialist policies, fashioned new policies in a hurry and tried them out. They worked. In two years the crisis was overcome, and I was no longer needed. So I left.
At that time I was full of passion and zeal. I felt that we needed to do much more. So I turned to journalism.
Now I am no longer so evangelical. The media are a melting pot of ideas and emotions. If one is careful enough not to take them too seriously, they can provide much excitement and entertainment. I am one of the performers in the drama.
Ideas get honed and tempered in the crucible of debate. I look for a more equal relationship between the writer and the reader in this blog.